ghaff

6 ms·

91.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Every job I had post-school effectively required that I owned a car and knew how to operate it--whether to go into an office or for frictionless business travel. In one or two cases, I could maybe have gotten off with flying and then rentin
92.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Logically, the weekend days belong together on a calendar but that's not how US calendars are typically laid out.
93.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I didn't hate the 25-30 minute driving commute I had at one point but I had to go in pretty much every day even in the snow which wasn't great. This was a time when you were pretty much expected to go into the office other than a
94.
by ghaff 2mo ago
My accountant always told me maybe but there are conditions and it's a red flag.
95.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I'd probably feel different if I had a 5-10 minute walk to an urban office but I never had. (Did have a very short suburban commute for a while, but people I knew were always pulling dangerous stunts when they saw me walking to pick me
96.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I saw some management being hesitant about enforcing back to office at least part-time. But the way a lot of companies did hiring during COVID it was going to be pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless they wanted to lose a l
97.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Very anecdotally, it seems to go both ways. If there is a relatively local office, people are generally expected to go in. If there isn't, the employee often pays (but not always).
98.
by ghaff 2mo ago
It's not just LCOL options. For even modestly large companies, there are probably teams scattered around the world and you're having teleconferences at many hours of the day and night.
99.
by ghaff 2mo ago
One suggestion from David Allen that I always liked--mind you I'm not a David Allen afficionado in general--is that if you can do something in 5 minutes, just do it rather than add it to a to-do list. Mind you, 5 minutes can end up tak
100.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I didn't have to do it every day and it wasn't for that long a period but I had sort of come to the conclusion that it wasn't sustainable, especially after the novelty of working in the city wore off. I live fairly far ou
101.
by ghaff 2mo ago
When I commuted semi-regularly into a downtown office, it was a good 90 minutes. Latterly, going into a newer company's customer briefing center was more like 2 hours each way. I had access to commuter rail which was more pleasant than
102.
by ghaff 2mo ago
There's still plenty of real estate. It probably just isn't where you want to live.
103.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Clothes (patched up as needed), beyond the minimum, long used to be a luxury for the most part.
104.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Hang a left at the unmarked road where Tom's house used to be :-)
105.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I do a fair number of long distance walks in the UK and I do carry maps and a compass, but honestly they're not really high resolution enough to be very useful to the degree that the paths aren't well marked. Having GPS tracks mak
106.
by ghaff 2mo ago
It can be hard to be simultaneously situationally aware of the "ground truth" and following instructions whether from a machine or a person. Not impossible of course--nor should it be. But dealing with conflicting instructions in
107.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Way back when, I did take some orienteering although I never did it seriously especially because, in the Northeast, it's mostly trails. But I haven't taken any orienteering for years and years.
108.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I was hiking one time and did have a guidebook. Things didn't look quite right but I did convince myself I was on the right track. (This was pre-GPS.) Eventually I ended up in someone's backyard. Fortunately there was (obviously)
109.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Navigate and safely drive at the same time maybe? Which people were presumably not doing 500 years ago. When walking, you're in a lot better position to stop and get your bearings. You're probably also not walking as much to total
110.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I have a friend I sometimes take to the Longwood Medical Center area (which I'm not very familiar with). She's actually quite a careful conservative driver. But we go there and it's get in the left lane, now get in the right
111.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Yeah, but I'm usually not driving around European cities so it's less of an issue.
112.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Pre-(consumer) GPS, I definitely got turned around even in cities I knew reasonably well that aren't on a grid system in parts. It can be bad enough today in some sections of busy cities where you need to constantly shift lanes etc. an
113.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I had a real PITA with medallion signature a while back. The local branch couldn't do it and, in spite of providing all my documents, the central location also couldn't do it for some reason. Ended up having to drive 45 minutes to
114.
by ghaff 2mo ago
And 1990s era website design (maybe). I'll have to retrieve my credentials from somewhere I guess. Not sure why they're not unifying it with other government websites.
115.
by ghaff 2mo ago
>Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when
116.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Sort of. While not really mainstream, there are private roads (and long driveways), wells, and a (limited) amount of home-schooling. Not hospitals obviously as that requires specialized training and equipment.
117.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Railways--and public transit generally--is optimized for people who speak the native language and use the system regularly and more or less ignore the jet-lagged person just off a flight who doesn't speak the language. In general, a lo
118.
by ghaff 2mo ago
I was a semi-power user once upon a time--even before Excel itself came on the scene. But latterly, spreadsheets were and are just a convenient way to create tabular information even if there aren't calculations involved, much less com
119.
by ghaff 2mo ago
The current system is probably closer to that than a lot of people would like to admit.
120.
by ghaff 2mo ago
Totally agree. I could name (but won't) a couple other areas where the same sort of thing has tended to happen. It ends up cheaper and more PR-friendly to hire someone into a senior position that handles such-and-such than to have to a

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